Damn. When you put it like that, yeah, it's...pretty worrisome. SJW aside, we are basically playing Todd Howard's character. No matter what we do, no matter what we look like, act like, no matter what we call ourselves, no matter if we're playing a man or a woman, we're Todd Howard's character. We're a father/mother looking for the infant son and avenging a murdered spouse.

Yikes.

True, but with the success of Skyrim and it drawing alot of new fans in, mainly because of its modding. Well they had new people to deliver to and for. Oblivion sold 6 - 10 million copies in its lifetime, and while that is alot Skyrim is sitting on about 30 million copies sold. And that is a huge fanbase to deliver to and please everyone. So they made some tough choices, and some will like them for it, and some will hate them. But atleast they made them. I am sorry that you don't like what they have produced though. It really does svck when a developer you like and put your faith in does something this drastic.

Yes you can have relations with men and women and Deacon is a good choice, for 1 thing he is a synth so he never gets tired

But every single Fallout game gives the protagonist a fixed backstory. Fallout 1 and 3 have you as a Vault Dweller. Fallout 2 and Tactics have you as a Tribal. New Vegas almost had a protagonist without a fixed backstory, but Lonesome Road ruined that. There is actually more backstory with the Lone Wanderer compared to the Sole Survivor since we know that they were born outside of the vault, entered Vault 101, and lived their life until they left. With the Sole Survivor, we just know that one is a war hero, but we have no idea why or in which part of the military they served and the other has a law degree. As far as personality goes, we can define it by the dialog choices we make. Especially with that sarcastic option. The Sole Survivor could be a Commie spy for all we know.

What's funny about the Beth games is how they keep preaching that they are so in touch with the modding community and want to keep their games open to that so people can really get the game experience they want. Then they go and make something like this, where the core mechanics are so far removed from the mods that made FO3, FONV and Skyrim into truly amazing games, even though they clearly implemented a lot of those mods. It's like they went "we hear you, we'll use it...to make something completely different!" Don't reinvent the wheel when you have all the ingredients to make a goddam Ferrari!

If they really wanted to rely on mods making their games great, then awesome! That's a niche genre right there! If they had only made the core mechanics more like an actual RPG, like in the earlier versions, and focused more on a good story, then people could mod it from there and it would end up amazing. Instead, we have this pre-packaged soulless shooter with very little wiggle room and a base game that are so far from what mods made the earlier games that I don't even know where to start fixing this mess.

Better modders than myself will surely work wonders, but you can only change so much.

Alright. Just my personal opinion on this topic:

I am gay myself, and I have to say that, though I would never want less options in a game for anybody (or life, for that matter), having ANY kind of "romance" in an RPG means absolutely nothing to me since that isn't why I play a game: to have a pretend virtual boyfriend or girlfriend.

Again, that's just me. I mean no offense to anybody. I hope Bethesda gives everyone what they want for their personal play experience. Having said that, forcing a fictional character's sixuality into the game isn't the right way to go, in my opinion, especially since none of them so far have been what I would be into myself. In everyday life, most of us don't just walk around going "I'M GAY I'M GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY" but in video games and TV shows it seems like they do that to make SURE we know they are gay. I think Bethesda went the correct route with romances in this Fallout. It's not something that's jammed into your face, gay or straight. (so far at least, from what I have observed. I'm only level 20).

Personally, I can do without any sort of romances in any RPG whatsoever, no matter the orientation, since it doesn't advance the plot, is totally trivial and unecessary, and it doesn't make my character more capable of killing mobs, and I certainly don't care about teeny angsty romances like in the Final Fantasies. Just so much cutscene and dialogue to skip so I get back to the actual story and sword swinging, spellcasting, gun shooting.

tl:dr - romance in a virtual fictional game is unimportant to me.

AH but there's the rub - those other choices were all things that would either have been beyond our control anyway (father) or inconsequential (courier). The others I can't really speak on but again, being a Vault Dweller is kind of beyond our control due to the circumstances of the entire game situation. A vault dweller versus a married vault dweller with a kid? Which one has more room for our own personal headcanon?

Even in the 50's - the REAL 50's not the 2077 50's where this game is set... marriage to someone and children was the kind of thing that was completely under the person's control in America. That's a major life choice that not everyone made.

Back to the game - it's even supported in the lore in places as strict as the Brotherhood of Steel, where Veronica was. Even in a place like that people were able to make their own choices about who they spent their lives with.

So.... it doesn't really compare. That's the reason some of us are asking "wtf?".

Besides that, the story is weak, hokey, and terribly written anyway. Go play it and watch how somehow NPCs know about certain companions whether you had them with you or not, and how they appear out of thin air right outside where you are even if you left them all the way across the map in your home base. That's some epic storytelling right there. Hopefully that's ambiguous enough to not count as spoiler but if it isn't please edit it out rather than delete the whole post.

Even setting aside the major choice being made for you and all your responses to people in the game being either "I'm a loving husband\wife and concerned father\mother" or "Sarcastically I'm a loving husband\wife and concerned father\mother", the story itself doesn't stand on its own, especially compared to earlier installments of the series. It's definitely not something that blew anyone away, so we're left with this sour taste about the whole thing and we can't even say "Well [censored], it was still a GREAT STORY so they totally made up for it."

Whoa, that was a lot of stuff in very different directions.

Personally, I think that if bethesda wants to try their hand at a fixed character, to a certain degree, they are free to do so. The buyers are free to ignore such a product.

Voiced protagonist? *sigh* Well they also kept selling games with graphics, where all the trashcans/robots/other stuff didn't look like I imagined them to be.

The only real limitless game... is people's own imagination... Playing a game, any game, puts any kind of limits on that.

Hmm, I get your point... For me though it's about immersion in a way. It seems realistic enough to forego romance in a game that covers eg. hours, days, weeks. When you start creeping up on months, years and living somewhere permanently, it seems unrealistic to forego romance.

But Fallout has never been about living somewhere permanently, to be honest, and it shouldn't be. It's about a lone hero wandering the wastelands righting wrongs, or committing evils upon the people they meet. Haven't you ever seen the basis for the series? "A Boy and His Dog"?

Yes and "Star Trek" isn't about Klingons becoming allies of the Federation and Beta-Zoids going around all sensitive like and stuff . . . it is about WASP maverick white guys and their strange pointy ear "buddy" doing double-fisted punches against big lizard guys and flying through lava lamp nebulae in space.

............I think you're segueing my point to a place that was neither in my mind or my intended direction...

I think it's silly that every companion is bisixual or, rather protagonist-sixual.

Gender should play a larger role and lead to varying approaches, choices, and dialogue like it did in Fallout 2.

I sort of agree to an extent. I don't want to actually "hear" my character's voice or have his personality defined for me. Fallout 2's dialogue options were perfect. I do understand why Bethesda can't do that anymore: It's way, way too much voice acting and budget strain to have actors announce out all the possible replies to each situation.

So a railroading game with 2 tracks (good / evil)? Sounds rather boring unless it's one helluva story with sights along the way. I do prefer having the choice between being lone or not, wandering or striking out from a base or not... in addition to good/evil.

"Beloved"?

? words in my mouth, if you'll pardon my rebuttal. I never said only good/evil. I said doing either/or of those things: as the situation merits.

Yeah, I kinda did that. Sorry about that... It just sounded relatively narrow as opposed to that I prefer to have a choice in those things. Whether to be truely a lone wanderer and how much wandering I wanna do.

For me things are getting a little side tracked. I really do not care how you play your character, after all that is what RPG is all about. What bugs me is not your character but the NPC's in the game. I do NOT like them being "universal." I like my NPC's to have real character, when they make them different 'people' based on how the player is playing his character then that ruins immersion for me, they become cookie cutter not real.

You want to have an NPC that is gay or bi, you want to have the NPC be loose and sleep with anyone or on the other extreme not give out at all, and you want to have a Female NPC act butch or a male act all girly? Cool but make their character consistent! When you make them "universal" it makes it much harder for me to stay in character.

Make my character have to adapt to the enviroment, not the other way around.

But marriage was something that was not completely under the person's control in America in the 1950s. If you were a white male marrying a white female, then you could marry whoever you want. However, if you were a white male marrying a black female in Texas, then you would have to move to New Mexico or some other state that didn't have Anti-miscegenation laws. If this game was set in Texas, then it is possible that you can't have a white man marry a black woman. In the 1950s, it was legal to have a white man marry a black woman in the 1950s.

It has only been less than 10 years when the first state legalized gay marriage and only this year has every single state legalized gay marriage. Considering that the Fallout universe is based on 1950s values, then gay marriage isn't likely to be legal in 2077. Since the baby is such a critical part of the game, then we have to be locked in a standard Nuclear family. So either your character realizes that they are gay after being married for years or they are hiding their true selves by marrying someone and having the weekly guy's night out or women's night out. Having two guys or two women live together in the 1950s is a big red flag and likely to cause a lot of discrimination that can be avoided. Fallout 4 seems to be the opposite of Fallout 3 due to instead of having the child searching for their parent, it is the parent looking for their child.

So having the protagonist in a standard nuclear family is beyond our control due to Fallout using 1950s values and Bethesda forcing us into playing the opposite of Fallout 3's story.

not that it really matters but he isn't a synth and you can't romance him

....so..like..can synths...you know...copulate? And if so, does it ..uhh...squirt something? I'm not sure how the synth thing works.

use your imagination, whatever floats your boat

wow you're really thinking about this

ok. In that case they squirt St Germaine liqeur and poop chocolate ice cream!

How would you know they were "universal" if Bethesda hadn't come out and said it or you went to the wiki where people reported their findings? As an argument against 'immersion', this seems incredibly weak. You already killed your immersion by going to the wiki or reading the press releases to begin with. How does a character responding to my advances in a completely different game where you aren't playing affect your game? It's not like they have built-in dialogue that informs you "Oh, by the way, I'm going to respond to your advances, but Souljacker is playing a chick in her game and I'm going to also respond to hers if she's interested".

Trust me, the alternative is worse. The alternative is attacks on players who make mods to change Cassandra to be romanticeable by a female because "It's all the straight guys got so leave it alone!" or attacks on Dorian modmakers because "You're erasing his gayness and you're an awful person so go die!" And all the forums blowing up one way or the other because the character that player liked wasn't available to their character and they feel like they missed a huge chunk of the gaming experience because of it. You *think* it adds flavor and immersion, until the fantasy character that you really liked shoots you down because "reasons". And until you see what the forums look like when they DO handle it that way. Here we get many threads on actual gameplay stuff and very few - I count only two active right now and over the last couple weeks of release maybe a total of 5 - about relationship stuff in the game. Go over to BioWare's forums and they probably still have people arguing about that Cassandra mod. It really was ridiculous. For all the 'flavor' it added, it fueled some pretty awful and mean-spirited back and forth between players.

Want to roleplay a romantic rejection? You don't really need to. Step outside your door and hit on the next 10 men or women you see. Guaranteed at least half of them will give you the rejection you are looking for. It's nice to not have to worry about working so hard to build a relationship with a companion npc and then be rejected. You just play the game and enjoy the world with the companion you like. That's why we call things like this fantasy and not reality.